A Christmas Visit to North Pole, Alaska

The city of North Pole does its best to live up to the name.

The city of North Pole does its best to live up to its name. Its streets are called things like “Snowman Lane,” “Holiday Road,” and “St Nicholas Drive”; its lampposts sport jolly red stripes all year round; and a former city council member is legally named Santa Claus. But it’s rather a large responsibility for such a modest place.

North Pole comprises some four square miles of Alaska midland, bookended by an army base to the northeast and Eielson Air Force Base to the southwest. Settled, for a time, as the Davis homestead, it was sold to developers in the 1950s and renamed to attract toy manufacturers. (What came instead were a pair of oil refineries, the larger of which supplied jet fuel to Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport before it was shuttered in 2014.) “It’s not a one stoplight town, but it’s maybe like a three-stoplight town,” photographer Chris Maggio said after recent visit. The main attraction is the Santa Claus House; a large, perennially festive country store flanked by an ice sculpture park and a pen of live reindeer (also known as the “Antler Academy”). But beyond the House’s bounds, North Pole is mostly just a conservative, working-class community of 2,200 people in a singularly unforgiving landscape. Come wintertime—just when the city should be its most charming—temperatures dip to a prohibitively cool one degree or lower. “I would say the cheer there comes in fits and starts,” Maggio says. “The sunlight from dawn to dusk lasts about three and a half hours in December.”

But Alaskans are made of hardy stuff. Not only do North Polers seem impervious to the cold, but they’ve also shouldered the city’s particular burdens with verve characteristic of the state. As the holidays roll around, and letters addressed to Santa (the fictive one, not the local politician) arrive by the thousands, the people of North Pole and neighboring Fairbanks divide and conquer; convening at churches and schools to mail back pre-typed responses. (Santa’s Letters, a non-profit established expressly for this purpose, accepts donations for paper, envelopes, and stamps all year.) Maggio was amazed at their diligence. “Whether they’re into the tradition of Christmas being linked to them or not, these tough Alaskans realize that it’s their duty” to send letters, he says. “It feels very foisted upon them, but you won’t hear a single person complain … Everybody was just kind of going with it.” Jason Donald, a North Pole mailman and co-founder of Santa’s Letters, sees things that way, too. “We embrace it,” he says. For people living in North Pole, the Christmas thing is “just part of the deal.”

North Pole has a lot on its mind right now; for one thing, military build-up at the air force base will attract some 3,000 people by 2022. (Donald, a Pennsylvania native, was himself stationed in North Pole in the early nineties.) But the city still has its fun. Over time, its citizens have dreamt up certain traditions of their own, carving out a culture that thrives even after the yuletide. Each year, an honorary King and Queen of North Pole are elected (for 2018-2019, they’re Troy and Angie Hawks of the Hawks Greenhouse); the city boasts an all-female roller derby team called the North Pole Babes in Toyland; and in late May, the “Cruis’n with Santa” Car Show and Street Fair unfolds outside of the Santa Claus House. In the de facto Christmas capital of America, the more is truly the merrier.

(Left) Visitors pose with the city’s fifty-foot fiberglass Santa statue. It was first erected in 1984. (Right) North Pole, AK is about a 30-minute drive from Fairbanks International Airport.

The streetlights look like candy canes all year long.

(Left) A celebrity sighting. (Right) Businesses all across town can’t help but embrace the holiday spirit.

Molly, a resident of North Pole.

(Left) The North Pole Police go undercover. (Right) The “official” North Pole flag.

North Pole’s City Hall takes the holidays very seriously. Seen here is (Left) Mike Welch, Mayor of North Pole, and (Right) Judy Binkley, City Clerk.

One former member of city council alongside a current member.

Awaiting the big day. (The countdown runs 24/7/365.)

(Left) The Hotel North Pole, which boasts a few Santa Suites: rooms where you can sleep alongside a Christmas tree all year 'round. (Right) A local family enacts a nativity scene in Fairbanks.

Citizens of North Pole and visitors from nearby Fairbanks march in the cold toward the Santa Claus House, a North Pole landmark. Festive light displays make a strong impression in the winter months, when there are fewer than four hours of sunlight per day.

Entering North Pole.

(Left) Letters arrive for Santa all year, but in November and December they number between 2,000 and 3,000 daily. (Right) A bulletin board matches letter themes to their appropriate response.

Volunteer “elves” gather at Saint Nicholas Catholic Church to answer letters to Santa. They are encouraged to add a personal note at the end of each pre-typed response.

(Left) One of a handful of Santas working in North Pole. (Right) The ice sculpture park “Christmas in Ice” opens in North Pole for 6 weeks each year.

The recently crowned Queen and King of North Pole, Angie and Troy.

(Left) Rebecca, a reindeer handler, with one of her wards, Comet, near the Santa Claus House. (Right) Santa takes flight on Richardson Highway.